LB 875 
.C2 
Copy 1 



national Saturation 




By BRUCE CALVERT 



PRICE FIFTY CENTS 



• • • • 



Books by Bruce Calvert. 

1. Emma Goldman and the Police - $ .10 

One of the most powerful and stirring appeals 
ever written for the right of free speech. 

2. Socialism and Progress - - .10 

A scientific analysis and a broad view of just 
what Socialism means to the world. 

3. Marriage and Divorce - - .10 

A clear exposition of the origin and meaning of 
Institutional Marriage, and a plea for unrestrict- 
ed Divorce. 

4. Woman and Her Sex Rights - .10 

A plea for woman's freedom and her right to 
her own body. 

5. Rational Education — Paper 50c; Boards 1.00 

The keynote of our future educational system. 
The education that liberates, not enslaves. 

6. Science and Health - - .25 

Secrets of Eddyism laid bare. Being the first 
and only scientific and rational explanation of 
the failures as well as the cures of Christian 
Science, and all other Systems of Healing now 
before the world. 

For sale by all book and news dealer* or order direct. 

THE OPEN ROAD 

GRIFFITH (LAKE COUNTY) INDIANA 

R . F. D. NO. 1. PlQEON-ROOST-IN-THE-WOODS 



RATIONAL EDUCATION 

The Keynote of the Rational School. 
Education that liberates, not enslaves. 



□ CZD □ 



By 

BRUCE CALVERT 

Director of The Rational School Center, Chicago, Illinois. 



□ i 1 □ 



Published by 

THE OPEN ROAD PRESS 

Griffith, (Lake County) Indiana. 
R. F. D. No. 1 . Pigeon - Roost - in - the -Woods. 



u 



#%» 



Copyright 1911 

by 
Bruce Calvert. 



'CI.A309126 



BRUCE CALVERT 



Introduction. 



"M ATURE has wisely provided but one sin- 
gle means whereby man may grow, at- 
tain, evolve, progress — and that is thru 
labor. Activity, endeavor, exercise is the 
basic law of hunian unfoldment. Work 
with body and mind. With hand and bcrain. 
Exercise of all the faculties of mind, 
of soul, of spirit; of all the muscles of the 
body. There is no other way. 

Man comes into this life a mere bundle 
of latent possibilities. When he has been 
delivered from the maternal matrix and 
when thru his first breath he has made his 
own contact with this sense world, nature 
had done all that she can do for him. Here 
he is left to himself. His life is his own. 
Henceforth all progress, all expansion, all 
development, must come thru his own exer- 
tions. Man is master of his own destiny. 

To be born or thrust into a position where 
work is not required or permitted is a terri- 

7 



INTRODUCTION. 

ble handicap. The individual so hampered 
hias no chance. Shut out from the moving 
currents of life he will rust and rot in aim- 
less eddies of stagnation. Deprived of the 
opportunity or desire for exertion the hu- 
man animal lives and dies in darkness. 
Never unfolds. Never rises above the plane 
of possibilities. Activity is life. Rest is 
death. <* <* <& 

Work is the law of life. When we know 
this law we see that we must love our work 
as we love life itself. Our very existence 
depends upon it. It is the bone and marrow 
of human life. Loveless work means a love- 
less, hopeless, dharacterless life. 

<4 •* V 

He who works only because compelled to 
do so for food and shelter, and 'he who takes 
no part in the world's work because he is 
physically beyond the necessity for it, are 
alike miserable unfortunates. The earth is 
our workshop. The universe is our exercise 
ground. Life is our opportunity. 

As to attainment there is no end, so to 
effort there can be no ceasing. Each new 

8 



INTRODUCTION. 

step upward on tihe heights, but brings 
larger and more difficult fields of endeavor 
into view. The reward of accomplishment 
is not rest, but harder things to accomplish. 
That old dream of an eternal rest with 
folded hands belongs to the babyhood of the 
race. That Eabbinical tale of labor being 
visited upon men as a punishment belongs to 
an age when idleness was a virtue and labor 
ignoble. An age of priest and prophet. 
* <* <f 

We know today that labor is the supreme 
virtue. Sacred and fundamental as life it- 
self is the right to labor in freedom and joy. 
That a very large mass of mankind are not 
now permitted to do this is the severest in- 
dictment of our civilization. It shows in 
fact that we haven't yet begun to be civ- 
ilized, but are still deep in the shadows of 
barbarism. We must and we will right this 
terrible wrong. That will be humanity's 
next great step. To provide a society where 
all men may (have as William Morris said, 
the opportunity of doing work that is worth 
doing and not of itself unpleasant to do, and 

9 



INTRODUCTION. 

under conditions in which the work shall be 
neither overburdensome nor overwearisome. 

What man's unfoldment in freedom 
would be like we can scarcely conceive. 
What a child brought up under the influ- 
ences of the Rational school where were no 
ihibitions of fear, superstition or conven- 
tion, no false social restrictions, and no re- 
pressions of authority, would be like we can 
hardly imagine. The experiment remains 
yet to be tried. The world is getting ready 
to make the trial, tho. 

That the spirit will flower in beauty, and 
that the child so happily placed will ap- 
proach the superman is my faith, and to 

see the experiment tried is my dream. 

f* <* * 

We've had enough of the authoritarian 
method. Enough of education by force. 
We must now come back to the great 
simple truths that love is the law of life. 
That we learn only in moments of joy. That 
the pupil will accept only that which his 
nature craves. 

10 



Rational Education. 

Chapter I. 

Education and Life. 

THE most important thing in the life of 
every human being is education. It be- 
gins with the first breath, and it covers the 
whole of life, ending only with the last 
breath. All that man has ever accomplished 
in his long evolution from nakedness and 
savagery to his present estate, has been 
through education. 

Surely I do not need to prove that a ra- 
tional, or reasonable, sane or natural educa- 
tional method is a constructive process that 
will foster and hasten man's development; 
while an irrational or unnatural method is 
a destructive force, retarding his progress 
and inhibiting his growth. 

In the last few centuries the educational 
machinery all over the world has crystallized 
into a set system of pedagogics centering 
in schools or institutions of learning. Thus, 

11 



RATIQNAL EDUCATION. 

the educational life of the race has become 
institutionalized. And, like every other in- 
stitution of man — as religion, government, 
economics — has become rotten and ineffi- 
cient. It has suffered the fate of all insti- 
tutions. It has become narrow, intolerant, 
inflexible. It now enslaves, instead of free- 
ing man. 

This condition of things is not strange, 
nor to be wondered at. It is the law of na- 
ture. The moment man seizes a truth and 
attempts to bind it to a rigid formula, or 
puts his spiritual life into a moral code, or 
his social or economic ideals into a set pro- 
gram governed by an institution, he signs 
his intellectual death warrant and invites 
spiritual dissolution. 

Man must be fluid. Must be able to 
change. Institutions are not fluid. They 
never change until forced to do so, and then 
they flght to the death to maintain their 
dogmas. 

There are no institutions in nature. Na- 
ture is everywhere plastic, fluid. Man alone 
creates institutions, and then suffers the 

12 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

awful price of slavery to the dragons of his 

own creation. 

* <* <4 

Thus in education the institution has now 
become the important thing. Man himself 
is lost sight of. Subordinated to the ma- 
chine he has created. Submerged in the edu- 
cational system. As administered in our 
schools and colleges, education has lost its 
soul. Its spirit has fled. It is a lifeless shell, 
having the letter, but not the substance. 
Teaching is everywhere now but a mechan- 
ical maintenance of discipline. 

The original purpose of the school and 
the teacher, as seen in those noble schools 
of Plato and Socrates, was to train the mind 
to grasp the facts of nature and organize 
them into an individual working concep- 
tion of the cosmos. It was to free the stu- 
dent from obsession and superstition. To 
throw him upon the integrity of his own 
thought. To make his own soul the su- 
preme center of his universe. 

And that is what Rational Education 
must be. Also that is what it never will be 

13 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

so long as present dogmatic methods con- 
tinue. 

Starting with the heroic Grecian period, 
what happened? Educational systems grad- 
ually became dogmatic, corrupt. Like 
ehurches and governments, the system no 
longer looking for the truth, but degenerat- 
ing into an organized tyranny, to force the 
acceptance of recognized creeds and author- 
ities, however repugnant to the thought of 
the individual. For more than 2,000 years 
teaching has been an intellectual tyranny 
compelling uniformity. The effort has been 
to systematize and standardize the thought 
processes of man. Where are the splendid 
intellects of Plato's day? Alas, the world 
knows them not! Since the rational schools 
which were the glory of intellectual Athens, 
the race has only produced six or seven men 
of intellect. A few great and noble spirits 
who nourished in spite of educational sys- 
tems. The balance of humanity's millions are 
all scrubs. There is no intellectual liberty 
today in all the earth. I The school system 

14 V. 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

in all countries is a tyranny, forcing accept- 
ance of its decrees with iron hand. 

<* <* <4 

The crime lies in the fact that the educa- 
tional system exerts its malevolent influence 
upon the plastic mind of youth. Upon the 
helpless child before it is able to protect 
itself. It is difficult to state in temperate 
language the terrible wrong the school sys- 
tem thus perpetrates upon helpless, inno- 
cent childhood. 

It is bad enough to take a man of de- 
veloped mind and force him with the whips 
of starvation and social ostracism into con- 
formity. Yet he can at least suffer and find 
the holy joy of the martyr in his immolation. 
But to take a child and lock the clamps 
and fetters of conformity upon that little 
brain is so monstrous a wrong that there 
are no words to measure it. Civilization is 
paying, and will pay a terrible price in mis- 
ery, blood and tears, for this wrong. 

It is positively true there is no place in 
our modern educational system for initiative, 

15 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

for originality. The child is denied the poor 
right to construct his own universe. With 
the mailed fist of authority, a cut-and-dried 
system of morals, economics, religion and 
government is thrust down his throat. His 
mind and his reasoning faculties are so para- 
lyzed that he does not attempt to think. Not 
one in a million, I believe, of the human 
family today is capable of using his brains. 
The power to think has almost disappeared 
from among us. A man must pay the price 
of independent thought almost with his life. 
Surely at the cost of his comfort, social 
standing, financial independence and about 
everything else the hysterical world of to- 
day holds as desirable. Everywhere our 
system is built upon repression. Repression 
is death. Expression alone, full and free, is 
life. 

Whoever heard of any teacher, from the 
district school to the university, asking a 
student: "What do you think about this?" 
Never! It's always: "What does Hibrow 
the great authority, say about it?" The only 
important thing, the only sacred thing — 

16 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

what the learner himself thinks — is utterly 
lost sight of. If you are not free to look the 
facts of life in the face, to draw your own 
conclusions, make your own estimates of 
men and measures, express freely the 
thought of your own soul without coercion, 
you never can be a man. You will be but a 
thing, an imitator. You still belong to the 
monkey race. 

<i * <§ 

Any one with a rudimentary brain could 
see the truth of what I have said if we 
were not all scared too stiff to think for 
ourselves. / We are intellectual cowards, 
made so by the false educational system 
that has cursed us. We are afraid of the 
unconventional. We bow and cringe and 
fawn before the authorities. (Our modern 
educational system all over the 'world turns 
out a race of intellectual lick-spittles. We 
dare not think. We are afraid to think. 
Afraid of our own minds. We have to wait 
to see what the "Evening Swill Barrel" 
says. What some borborygmic doctor, pul- 
pit-pounder, or sickly college professor has 

17 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

to offer before we form or express an 
opinion of our own. 

This is so awfully, ghastly true that we 
cannot smile. The average man is so utterly 
under the spell of this idiotic worship of 
titles that he dare not raise his head. Is it 
not so? Answer me. Bring up any ques- 
tion before the next man you meet, and he 
will quote you what some doctor, or pro- 
fessor, or some Hon. dirty grafting politi- 
cian says, and that settles the matter. Try 
it. 

One original pupil asserting his inalien- 
able right to think for himself would upset 
any school or college in America. There is 
no place for the fearless independent think- 
er, no provision for him at all. All are 
hacked to fit the Procrustean bed. Our 
schools, colleges, and universities are organ- 
ized exactly like shoe factories. Turning 
out products all alike, all molded upon the 
same inflexible last, exhibiting the same 
dullness, mediocrity and incompetency. 
18 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

The master minds of all the ages have been 
those who never enjoyed any " educational' * 
advantages. They learned in the school of 
hard knocks, from mother nature. The sys- 
tem never got in its deadly work upon them. 
Who taught Socrates? Who trained Gali- 
leo? What academy graduated Copernicus? 
Who tutored Shakespeare, Darwin, Spencer, 
Whitman and all the rest of the mighty 
host? What college taught Edison to illu- 
minate the world with the electric spark? 
And the towering Lincoln, majestic giant, 
the deep waters of whose inner life were 
never troubled by the meddling fingers of 
Pedagogy, who taught him? From what 
college did he take his degree of common 
sense? Could a Lincoln possibly survive 
the Grammar and High School course of 
today? 

College men who have made anything of * 

themselves have done so in spite of their 
education. They will all tell you so. They 
have only contempt for the intellectual mill 
through which they passed. Thoreau would 

19 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

not pay $5 for his diploma from Harvard. 
Emerson, the master mind of the American 
Renaissance, was given the hemlock by 
"Dean Old Hahvad, don't you know." 

Have I overstated the case? I do not 
think so. In every class-room in the world 
today authorities are taught and referred to 
on every subject. Yet every authority so 
blindly worshipped and bitterly enforced 
must be partly or wholly wrong. Why? Be- 
cause it is not given to any man or work of 
man to be wholly right. Perfection is not 
a human attribute. Can we by legislation 
enforce a wrong over a right? Never! The 
wrong must and will fall. Eight and truth 
needs no defenders. Hands off! All errors 
have in themselves the seeds of their own 
downfall. Do not try to bolster up any 
theory or dogma. Just take away your hands, 
and if it falls it deserves to. You cannot 
hold the wrong in place anyway very long. 
Gravitation is after you. It works while 
you sleep. In the end you will only be 
crushed by the fall thereof. Better stand 
from under. 
20 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

Because the majority of the people be- 
lieve a thing is no evidence of its truth. 
On the contrary, it is just when we are most 
cock-sure about things that we make the 
biggest fools of ourselves. "The mass has 
always been wrong upon every question," 
says Matthew Arnold. For our own sakes 
we dare not accept any human judgment as 
right and final so long as there's one dis- 
senting voice in all the world. "Only what 
nobody denies is so," says Old Walt. 

* <4 ti 

Our youth are chained to the dead hands 
of the past. Our educational system is a 
festering charnel house of dead men's bones.) 
Have not the living a better title to this 
earth than the dead? If we are fettered to 
a regime established by men long moldering 
in their graves, then indeed the dead live 
and the living are dead. Away with the 
corpses of the past! Off with the shrouds 
of the dead ! Make way for man, living, 
plastic, ever-changing man! 

It is my purpose in these papers to arouse 

21 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

my readers to the menace of what we so 
blindly worship as our Free School System. 
Free indeed ! Heaven save the irony ! Slave 
School System we would better say. 

From the fact that little or no effort has 
been made to better things, and that no- 
body seems even to question the Tightness 
or infallibility of our school system, I am 
sorrowfully led to believe that there are 
few, almost none, of our vast population 
who have in any degree appreciated the 
dangers or wrongs in the system. 



22 



Ideal Teaching. 

Chapter II. 

WHETHER it will avail to present a con- 
structive outline of the new education 
to a people who do not know that there is 
anything wrong with the present system, I 
do not know. But there is a well corre- 
lated program of the Rational School. .Ra- 
tional education is no idle dream. Although 
such a school does not yet exist in the Wes- 
tern hemisphere, it is coming. And that, 
too, as a part of the evolutionary process of 
nature by which man is swept along toward 
higher things, however much he may, by his 
foolishness, hinder the onward movement. 
He may embarrass but cannot stop this 
mighty force. We are pushed upward in 
spite of our stupidity. Else there would be 
hope in nature. No chance for man. 
V tf <* 

Briefly, then, the Rational School will be 
organized to preserve the intellectual free- 
dom of the child. To develop his initiative 
and spontaneity in every direction. The 

23 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

teacher must be absolutely free. There will 
be no set standard to which he must con- 
form. If he wishes to spend a day in the 
woods, with the children, that will be his 
business. All instruction must be individ- 
ual. No teacher should have more than six 
to ten pupils in his charge. Text-books and 
authorities must be relegated to second 
place. The sanctity of the child's mind must 
never be invaded. Nothing must be taught 
as final. Courses of study, as in the present 
educational mill, must be thrown overboard. 
A set program for teaching must always be 
a failure. A course of study must always be 
wrong, because the teacher must meet the 
issues of the moment as he finds them. You 
are dealing with the human mind. You can 
not lay out a program today that will apply 
to a living human soul tomorrow. 

All courses of study, all fixed-in-advance 
plans of teaching must be failures. They 
cannot be anything else. Ideal teaching is 
spontaneous, adapting itself to the need of 
the moment. Ever flexible, elastic, fluid. 

Every school house must be in the middle 
24 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

of a 20 or 30-acre lot, where all the various 
agricultural and horticultural operations of 
the climate are carried on through all the 
seasons of the year. Association with do- 
mestic animals must be constant, that their 
care may teach sympathy, responsibility and 
understanding. 0, yes, we have much to 
learn from our friends whom we patronize 
as the " lower animals." 

The Rational School will not train the 
child to act as a cog in the great commercial 
machine, but will train him to become an in- 
dividual, a thinker, a unit, a center of light 
and life and spiritual power. Modern indus- 
trial activities will be taught for their cultu- 
ral advantages only. 

Health and the ability to take care of 
oneself, to understand and make the most of 
one's body, is the fundamental need of 
every human being, and that will be the 
first thing taught in the Rational School. If 
we, as a race, were capable of thinking at all, 
if we were not still in the monkey stage in- 

25 




RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

tellectually, the utter idiocy and absurdity 
of one man going to another when he is sick 
to find out what is the matter with him, and 
what can be done for him, would make us 
ashamed of ourselves. The doctor and the 
practice of medicine, like the preacher, the 
sky-pilot of the heavens, is the joke of the 
universe. 

Our pupils today spend long hours in 
the overheated, poisoned air of the school 
rooms, humped over their books reading 
about the benefit of fresh air and exercise. 
They rush home at intermission, grab a 
vicious lunch that a dog would refuse to 
eat and bolt it in order to hurry back to 
the school room to be taught about food 
chemistry, mastication and digestion. With- 
in ten minutes' walk of nature's wealth of 
flora and fauna they sit and read books and 
look at engravings on botany and zoology. 

<4 * ■* 

And the kindergarten. Ye gods! If 
Friedrich Froebel could see as I see the 
cruelties practiced upon the babies in his 
name in every city in our land! 
26 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

A little child is as full of intuition and 
spontaneity as an egg is of meat. A rest- 
less little human dynamo, with senses alert, 
forever reaching out, grasping at the great 
world about him, if you will only let him 
alone — even he, the poor helpless infant, 
must be standardized. I never feel so much 
like committing homicide or suicide as when 
I visit a kindergarten (Child's Garden) ! 
God save the mark ! To see the little fellows 
all put through the mill, as a horse is trained 
for the circus, all taking the same dinky 
little exercises, and playing the same woozy 
little sissy games. Taught, taught, eternally 
taught to death. 

The worthy ladies who, with whip in 
hand, act as ring masters in these daily 
performances of the babies, for all the world 
as the animals are trained in Hagenback's, 
are just like children who would pull up 
the tender plant by the roots to see how it 
is growing. And yet we think our kinder- 
garten system is the one solar sun on which 
there are no spots. I want to tell you it 
is the most dangerous, because it operates 

27 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

at the most helpless stage of life. With 
every succeeding year the child becomes a 
little more able to help himself, but in the 
kindergarten stage he is absolutely at the 
mercy of the Lady of Lions who puts him 
through his paces. 

<* (« <4 

The average teacher holds himself as a 
model, and he takes a just pride if the pupils 
copy him or her. Indeed, this is just what 
happens. (The personality of the teacher is 
everywhere impressed upon the pupil so 
that he rarely recovers from it. This is not 
education. It is damnation. \ 

The ideal educator — one worthy of the 
name of teacher at all — will seek to efface 
himself absolutely. Will refrain from influ- 
encing the child in any way whaetver, but 
will leave it absolutely free, without bias 
from himself, to flower in beauty as it will. 
That is the true task of the teacher. To dis- 
appear, to make himself useless and needless 
to the student. I fancy I see you smile 
when you look around among the teachers 
28 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

who touched your lives, and ask yourselves 
if you have ever known any of that kind. 

Perhaps I have said enough now to give 
a hint as to the method of the Rational 
School. In a word, then, what should ra- 
tional education do? 

This: Provide the child with the proper 
environment in which to grow. See to it 
that his energies are conserved and added to, 
and not depleted. Give him the opportunity 
for exercising all of his faculties, mental, 
physical, spiritual, and then — hands off ! Let 
him alone ! Leave him to develop according 
to the law of his own being under which 
he came into the world. More than this, no 
teacher, no man, no woman, no god can do. 

tg <* <* 

I think I hear the economist saying that 
all this will cost a good deal of money. 
And in an already overburdened, overtaxed, 
monopoly-ridden country how are we going 
to get the funds? 

I will tell you one way. The cost of our 
army and navy — a useless and ridiculous in- 

29 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

stitution devoted to professional violence 
and murder — for one year, would reconstruct 
the school system of the whole United 
States upon a rational basis. The cost of 
one Dreadnaught would establish a Rational 
School in every county in the state of Indi- 
ana. That is true. Three-fourths of our en- 
tire national revenue spent annually upon 
war or preparation for war. 

Wouldn't you as soon carry a teacher of 
the Rational School on your back as to carry 
a soldier and a sailor as every one of you 
now do? 

<* <* <* 

Yes, I will admit that I am and have been 
for a good many years devoting some of the 
hardest study of my life to the problem of 
rational education and right living. I be- 
lieve I have the conception, the ideal of the 
Rational School, fairly worked out. There 
is at present no school in America 
which comes up to the mark. I do not know 
that there are any abroad. There were some 
sixty to a hundred rational schools in Spain, 
30 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

established by Francisco Ferrer, the great- 
est educator of modern times. But the Chris- 
tian Church in Spain murdered Ferrer in 
cold blood, because his ideal was too far 
ahead of his times. They confiscated his 
property and destroyed his schools. 

You may kill the man, but you can not 
kill his thought. Tyranny is powerless be- 
fore the advancing waves of rationalism. 
Today the blood of Ferrer cries out from 
the soil to every right thinker in the world 
and in time to come we shall see the answer. 



But as nearly as I can understand it, a 
school something after the model of Ferrer's 
on the intellectual and spiritual side, and 
Booker Washington's school at Tuskegee, 
Ala., on the physical and industrial side, 
would be an approach to what I think ra- 
tional education should be. Tuskegee is 
well organized on the physical side, but 
it is an orthodox institution, in the dark 
ages spiritually. 

31 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

I hope yet to be one of the instruments 
of the great rationalistic upheaval of our 
times in making a rational school possible. 
I am proud to stand with the great and 
splendid souls working on the problem. I 
have given but a hint of what there is to 
do. May I hope some of the seeds shall 
fall upon ready soil? 

The present school system is rotten, cor- 
rupt beyond reformation.) At least that was 
the conclusion of Ferrer, who gave up all 
hope of improving the system, believing that 
our only success must lie in establishing 
new schools where rational methods will be 
applied. I think this is true. 

So far as I am concerned, I have no hope 
from any teacher or educator that I can 
now see projecting above the horizon. There 
are millions of teachers, but few of them 
will live long enough to be free. They are 
too well educated. The system has done 
its work. They know so much that is not 
so. They are so busy defending authorities 
that they have no time to defend themselves. 
32 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

We must endeavor then to found a new 
school or schools on the rational plan. And 
we shall have to develop an entirely new 
type of the ideal teacher. That is what I 
want to see accomplished. 

Woman must have her place, a very emi- 
nent and important place in the new edu- 
cation. We have given too little heed in 
the past to woman's thot. She is by nature 
a humanitarian. Her heart is in the race. 
-' With reproduction organs," says Emerson, 
11 which take hold upon eternity," she is 
the natural educator and conservator of the 
race, while man has come to be the exploiter. 
He has sold his soul to Mammon. Un- 
til woman's intuition is married to man's 
intellect, in very truth as well as in pre- 
tence we shall grope in darkness. And 
so side by side the emancipation of woman, 
her deliverance from bondage, her restora- 
tion to herself, and the rational education 
of the children of men shall proceed. 

I regard this as the greatest work con- 

33 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

fronting humanity today. The rational ed- 
ucation of the young. There is little to hope 
for from grown ups. They have passed 
thru the educational rollers and are flattened 
to standard shapes and sizes. The school 
has done its deadly work upon them. They 
cannot change. They have no intellectual 
vitality left. No brain vigor to readjust 
themselves to new mental foci. 

The average individual has almost no ca- 
pacity whatever for independent thought. 
When he does make a pretense of thinking, 
he merely looks wise and tunes his fiddle to 
the clamor around him.: If you think you 
are a thinker, you want to stand off a little 
and get a good look at yourself. If you're 
honest and can face the truth without flinch- 
ing you 11 probably be dumbfounded to dis- 
cover that you yourself are not doing any 
independent cerebrating at all, but like all 
the rest are taking your mental pabulum cut 
and dried, your conclusions and opinions 
ready made from your boss, or your fellow 
employees, or your wife's relations. I know. 
I've tried it. 
34 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

People who do not think, and do not even 
make any effort to think, cannot be expected 
to send their children to the rational school. 

The proletarian cannot spare his chil- 
dren — he is so close to the bread problem 
that he is compelled to send his babes into 
the factories, mines and shops in order to 
keep the whole family from starvation and 
want. 

The smug bourgeoisie with true reac- 
tionary fatuity will never abandon their 
idols. 

So long as water runs down hill and cold 
freezes, we surely never can expect the rul- 
ing classes to be interested in anything ra- 
tional, least of all, education. 

The revolutionary element — which is at 
present the only one in full sympathy with 
the rational school — is yet too weak in Amer- 
ica to afford a foundation for the new sys- 
tem. 

What is left, then? Well, that leaves us 
only the waifs and outcasts of society. The 
orphans and foundlings. The human flotsam 
and jetsam cast up by the slums. 

35 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

And that is just where I want to begin. 
That is where the Rational School can do its 
noblest work. 

I assure you that under the regime of the 
Rational School, such as I have briefly out- 
lined, we can take these little human out- 
casts from society's dumping ground and in 
a few years transform them into supermen 
and superwomen. They are the finest mate- 
rials we could have. The stones which the 
builders have rejected will truly become the 
head of the corner. "With this material, poor 
and unpromising as you might think it, we 
can by rational training, erect a society that 
will be purer, cleaner, sweeter, nobler, more 
efficient, greater in every way than any civ- 
ilization that has ever existed upon this 
earth. 



36 



The Rights of the Child in the 
Rational School. 

Chapter III. 

|7 VERY child born into this world is abso- 
lutely original, unique and individual in 
all its characteristics; and I believe that 
every child born under natural conditions, 
and not interfered with by unwise educa- 
tional methods is also a genius. 

Nature never duplicates. I am looking 
out from my cabin window upon a world of 
beauty. Every bud and blossom, flower and 
blade of grass is absolutely original. Nature 
is so rich in resources that she never uses the 
same mold twice. Altho the process of crea- 
tion has been going on for unnumbered mil- 
lions of years, and altho nature's forms are 
far beyond the power of numbers even to 
compute, yet no two creations in this world 
have ever been identical. 

The lesson is here. Why should we seek 
to compel a dead level of uniformity among 
human beings, when variation is the one con- 
stant and unchanging characteristic of all 

37 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

other forms of life? Shall man, the very 
highest form of creation that we know of 
now, be limited in his originality? Must he 
be filed and hammered, and pressed and 
pounded to a standard pattern of shapes and 
sizes ? 

I say, no! Give man the greatest free- 
dom of all of nature's products, because here 
alone individuality and peculiarity should 
express themselves in the very highest 

forms. 

<* <* <* 

If you take a group of children quite 
young, and before they have been standard- 
ized by the barbarous training in the public 
schools, you will find them to be wholly 
unique and original. But, alas, as the child 
grows in years, and the pressure of conven- 
tions and educational methods become 
stronger, the variation grows less. They con- 
stantly approach more nearly to a standard 
type. Whereas, under a rational, humane 
system of education the peculiarities and in- 
dividual traits should rather increase with 
the years. But you will not find it so. 
38 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

You cannot possibly tell what a group of 
natural children will do. But you can tell 
almost to a dead certainty what a bunch of 
men and women will do under any condition 
you can imagine them in. You can foretell 
almost to a mathematical closeness exactly 
what twenty-five people selected at random 
will do and say under any given conditions 
or circumstances. I defy you to do that 
with a flock of children who have not been 

spoiled. 

I reproduce here a couple of letters, one 
written by a boy eight years old, and the 
other by a girl of nine. These children are 
classed as "sub-normals," being completely 
deaf. They are, therefore, very much less 
advanced at their age than the normal child 
should be. They have been trained under 
the deaf oral method by which mutes are 
taught to articulate, in fact to speak, using 
the voice. Of course these children can never 
equal normal children in their development. 
Nature has denied them that possibility. The 
natural handicap under which they struggle 
will always keep them back. 

39 



f 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

But the particular two that I refer to 
have had the advantage of training, not 
wholly, but to a very limited extent only, 
under the rational method which I would 
inaugurate in every school in the land. I 
simply reproduce the letters to show how 
entirely unique, original and beautiful are 
the mental processes of an unspoiled child. 
By that I mean a child in charge of a teach- 
er who is big enough and great enough to 
understand the nature of mind action. The 
teacher who can keep hands off and allow 
the little one to unfold according to the law 
of its own being. And I want to tell you 
that this is the hardest thing in all the world 
to do. That is, to do nothing; to stand by; 
to keep hands off and let nature take its 
course. Any half-baked academic bread- 
and-butter miss can keep school; wield the 
ferrule; pound the multiplication table into 
the heads of her pupils with a mallet. But 
it takes a rare genius to know when to do 
nothing; to let the child alone, and not ruin 
its individuality, tear down its originality; 
not blunt and dwarf its initiative by tutor- 

40 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

ing, teaching, pestering and filling the little 
mind with suggesed ideas. 
* <* <• 

I say the natural child, left uninterfered 
with, allowed to grow in beauty and free- 
dom is quite capable of making its own con- 
clusions; of reaching out into the great 
world of fact and phenomena, and seizing 
upon the things its own nature demands for 
its growth. 

Does the bean, the raddish seed, the rose 
bush, know the elements it needs to take out 
of the soil for its own growth, development 
and beauty? Does it have to be instructed, 
and taught, and fed predigested food? 
Will the plant ever make the mistake of 
taking the wrong substance out of the soil 
or out of the air ? Never ! 

Do you tell me then that the mind, that 
the human plant is not infinitely more capa- 
ble of making its own selection of soul 
food if allowed to grow under rational con- 
ditions 1 

Observe, then, this letter of Clifford, aged 

41 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

eight, is entirely a voluntary composition on 
his part. He was not instructed what to 
write, nor how to write it. He was not told 
what to do. But he was given the opportu- 
nity to express himself in any way he 
choose, absolutely no conditions being im- 
posed upon him. 

THE GLASS. 

Once there was a very old man. He had no 
glass on his windows. He was very cold because 
he had no glass on his windows. He found some 
sand and a dime. He bought some soda. First 
he put the sand in a pot with the soda. He put 
the pot on a big fire. The sand and soda were 
changed into glass. He found an iron pipe. He 
blew into it and made many glass things. He 
got a hammer. He made the glass flat. He put 
the flat glass in the windows. He had a fine 
house. It was warm in there. 

CLIFFORD. 

Note the result. I defy any teacher, any 
college professor, or any literary man to 
equal the effort. I claim this composition to 
be a mark of unbridled genius. I have had 
some experience as a writing man. Not only 
that, but I have worked for years at the 
42 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

daily grind of advertisement writing. This 
is a mill where words, and even syllables are 
weighed; the saving of one or two words 
may often mean several hundred or even 
thousands of dollars to the advertiser. And 
yet I could not eliminate a word and tell 
this story as the poor, unpractised, deaf boy 
has done. Try it yourself. It ranks with 
the Sermon on the Mount for clean cut clar- 
ity and directness. 

The other composition, by Ethel, aged 
nine, reveals a corresponding mental flexi- 
bility. Here is a child telling its own story 
in its own way out of the experience that has 
come within its mental scope, and mind you, 
that the sense of hearing is entirely absent. 
What a charming figure is her thot about 
the flowers waking up and smiling. I would 
be proud of that myself. 

SPRING TIME. 

Today is spring. Soon the people will make 
gardens. They will plant flower seeds, vegetable 
seeds and fluii sccus in xntrr». The men will be- 
gin to prune the trees. They will mow the grass 

43 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

to make it pretty and very smooth. The leaves, 
flowers, vegetables, grass, fruits and everything 
will grow very fast. The moths and birds will 
come because spring is here. Some of the pussy- 
willow buds are open now. The robins are here. 
They will make nests pretty soon. They like 
spring. Many children are playing outdoors now. 
After a while the flowers will wake up and smile. 
The water wagons are sprinkling the water on 
the street because the wind blows the dust. In 
spring many children like to play all the time. 
In spring it is always beautiful. 

ETHEL. 

Now, if sub-normal children, physically 
below par, and mentally hedged in by the 
loss of that most educative sense — hearing — 
can do such remarkable things as these, do I 
have to prove what normal children can and 
will do under better advantages of freedom 
and teaching? 

I tell you that what we ought to do is to 
install the children in the teacher's place; 
let our fat-headed academic teachers go to 
school to the children and learn a few 
things. 
44 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

But the average teacher is as scared to 
death of originality or spontaneity as she 
would be if the devil himself poked his head 
in the school room. She cannot understand 
originality or genius — which is the same 
thing — and what she cannot understand she 
fears. She reduces her pupils to the com- 
mon dead level of mediocrity which comes 
within the scope of her little two-by-four or- 
thodox mentality. Otherwise she is in 
strange waters, and she does not know what 
to do. , 

In place of a genius appearing in about 
one of several hundred million human beings, 
we all ought to be geniuses. The inapt, the 
incompetent and incapable mentality ought 
to be as rare as the Whitmans, Darwins, 
Haeckels, Ingersolls and Lincolns. 

I wonder how many look forward to the 
day when this shall be possible? I do, and 
I am trying to bring it about. Don't think it 
is so far away. I am sure if I could make 
the experiment for the next ten years upon a 

45 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

group of homeless, outcast, foundling chil- 
dren, I could prove absolutely the truth and 
reasonableness of my hopes. 

<* <* « 

I say foundlings, because in this age, un- 
der the social conditions which confront us, 
it is hardly possible that any other children 
would be permitted to grow in a natural un- 
spoiled way. Parents demand that their 
children be like themselves. This means 
reproducing the stupidity, the brutalities 
and the ignorance which sets itself up as 
the standard from age to age. And so the 
only class from which I see anything to 
hope for at the beginning, at least, is among 
those who have no one to care for them ; no 
parents to insist upon reproducing their own 
limitations. 

But in a few years the teachers and a 
few other people would begin to see the 
possibilities in rational education. And then 
we should have men and women, thinkers 
and near-thinkers coming to the rational 
school to study our methods, and to learn — 
not from us — but from the children, who 
would be their teachers and ours as well. 

46 



The Teacher and the School of 
the Future. 

Chapter IV. 

1 WONDER if our educators will ever 
wake up to the fact that the personality 
of the teacher in the school room is worth 
far more than all the cut and dried pro- 
grams, schemes, outlines and mechanical 
methods of teaching, so much in vogue in 
all schools. 

Programs are for those who cannot do 
without them, a crutch for the incompetent 
to lean upon. But your true teacher is above 
all these. She is alert, keen, sensitive to 
the needs of the moment and equal to every 
emergency. She makes her programs anew 
every hour out of the materials in her hands 
and the demands that meet her. 

* <4 <4 

The teacher's example, her attitude to- 
ward work, life itself, her personality, soul 
qualities, and general atmosphere of health, 
saneness, sweetness and wholesomeness can 

47 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

never be replaced by any academic qualifi- 
cations, however great or satisfactory, or by 
any cut-and-dried curriculum. 

But the sad part of it is that these quali- 
ties, which alone make a teacher valuable 

are in fact never sought for. They are 
not considered as a part of the equip- 
ment in the selection of teachers as a 
rule. Those into whose hands we commit 
the education of our children are examined 
and get their certificates upon their ability 
to repeat a certain senseless formula of aca- 
demical sawdust, which has very little more 
of the real relation to life than the designs 
on the cover of the text book have to the 
science of mathematics. I know, for I've 
been a teacher myself- 

This satisfies the requirements and we 
do not look for that intangible thing, soul 
quality, which is the most lasting and beau- 
tiful influence in all the child's school-life 
— the thing which sticks to him through all 
his years, which often sets his key and de- 
termines the direction in which his life force 
shall be spent. 

48 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

Facts or chunks of unrelated informa- 
tion are worth very little. They may of 
course afford the material upon which a 
most elaborate artificial and senseless sys- 
tem of edueaion, so-called, may be spun out, 
but from which real development can never 
come. It is strength and health, mental 
freedom, intellectual honesty, fearlessness, 
and soul stuff that education should give. 
First of all health. 

In truth, our schools seem to turn out 
about everything else. Products of the 
school system exhibit shattered nerves, ru- 
ined digestions, weak eyes, hunched shoul- 
ders, crooked spines, dwarfed and crippled 
souls, monkey or parrot inability to reason, 
mental incompetence, wishy-washy man- 
hood, frivolous, anaemic womanhood. 

As I have previously remarked in these 
articles, finalities of judgments as to human 
institutions must not be taught in the Ra- 
tional School. Dogmas, hypotheses, customs, 
traditions, public opinion, the voices of 

49 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

church, state, or individuals must never be 
permitted to assume the authority and 
weight of truth. 

The soul of man should be as mercury 
in response to truth, yielding to the slight- 
est promptings of the spirit, yet always vi- 
brating to its own level at the last. 

<# Ci 9f 

What a satisfaction there is in being 
able to look at the great movements of the 
day — religious, philosophical, social or eco- 
nomic — free from personal bias or inherited 
prejudice. I marvel every day at the stunt- 
ing, dwarfing effects of preconceived judg- 
ments. 

We shut ourselves out from so much that 
is beautiful and good when we allow preju- 
dice to tinge our viewpoint, either in weigh- 
ing people or the great world questions. 

I suppose everything has its purpose and 
is good in its place, but I wish I could see 
the reason for the intolerance which seems 
50 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

to me a particularly malevolent form of hu- 
man cussedness that is holding us forever 
in the leash — keeping us down. 

The trouble is that the shell which we 
secrete around our minds becomes so hard- 
ened that we are shut in. We limit our- 
selves. We shunt the currents of divine 
truth away from us, and generate dark 
spots in our souls. 

We must actually free ourselves from 
any form of bias if we are to make head. 
We must be willing to revise our deductions 
every day, to tear down to the last stone 
the walls of prejudice and preconceived no- 
tions we have built around us, get rid of 
our shells, and face the world naked and 
unabashed, if necessary, to arrive at the 
truth. 

We dare not crystallize. We must re- 
main fluid, sensitive to the waves of truth 
from whatever source and in whatever form 
they may come. We must be like the spirit 
in the carpenter's level, responsive as the 

51 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

instrument is tipped this way or that, and 
yet always returning to our own center. 

When, then, I charge the educational 
systems of all the world today with being 
crystallized mixtures of error and truth, in- 
tolerance and ignorance, adroitly fostered 
by organized meanness, I but state a simple 
truth, which anyone with a rudimentary 
brain could see were not the eyes blinded 
by ignorance or interest. 

^ <* <« 

Yet we must not, dare not, yield to dis- 
couragement. This is a universe of law. 
There is a reason for everything. We are 
not floating aimlessly across the trackless 
wastes of time. We are not a rudderless 
derelict buffeted and beaten by the tides of 
chance. But we are actually moving swift- 
ly, surely, toward our goal. 

Where should we be now if Nature, 
when she had gotten as far along as the Go- 
rilla, had stopped to think about the im- 
measurable distance between him and Tol- 
52 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

stoy or Earnest Haeckel — would not she 
have become discouraged and given up the 
work in despair? 

* ^ <4 

The race moves on. The spirit may grow 
sad and the heart be wrung at the injustice, 
greed, misery and intolerance in the world, 
but yet we know that for every heartache 
there must be a balm, for every moan of 
anguish there must be a sigh of peace. 
Every wrong must be righted. Every debt 
must be paid. There are no bankrupt courts 
nor exemption laws in Nature. The Law 
of Compensation rests not nor sleeps. 

All is wise and all is good in its place. 
All is well. All is as it must be just at this 
moment. The new day is gestating, and out 
of the womb of present conditions will be 
born future betterment. 

Let the spirit rejoice ! Brighter days are 
coming. We have the same laws today, yes- 
terday and forever. Nature has no revised 
statutes. Evolution holds no constitutional 

53 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

conventions. As it was in the beginning, is 
now, and ever shall be, world without end, 
etc. The race moves forward. We can 
prove it by looking backward. 

Allons. 



54 



Memory and Memorizing. 

Chapter V. 

THE trouble with our present system of 
ethics and education is that we are try- 
ing to graft the moral sense onto the mind 
only, forgetting as we do in this age of over- 
balanced mentality, that there must be a 
brain and a body, backed up by vigorous 
health to make the teaching effective. When 
we begin to graft our moral training on the 
physical as well as the mental — in other 
words, when we begin to live our code of 
ethics in place of talking it only, then we 
shall begin to see results, and I am afraid 
not before. 

See how our educators flounder in their 
attempt to teach morals in the school room. 

Class room and Sunday School ethics do 
not travel very far in the Open Road of 
life. The moral sense must go deeper. It 
must be woven into the very blood and bone 
and fiber of the body. All teaching and all 
moral training which does not find its ulti- 

55 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

mate expression in a clean, healthy, vigor- 
ous, well-poised body is reactionary — dead 

wood. 

<* <* <* 

I have in the course of these papers 
made some very severe strictures upon our 
educational machinery. Some may think 
certain of the charges to be overdrawn or 
intemperate. I assure you such is not the 
case — indeed, far from it. If you will can- 
didly and honestly study the matter, visit 
the schools as I do, you will speedily see 
that I have not really made my indictments 
strong enough. Actual conditions are really 
worse than anything I have depicted. 
* <* >s 

Our antiquated school system is still 
blindly following the fetishes of the past; 
still gauging mental acquirement by the 
verbal memory. Gradgrind nourishes today 
as never before. We meet him in every 
school room. 

All the average teacher wants to know 
is "how much do you remember," not "how 

56 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

much do you understand" And poor Har- 
old and Mamie struggle to recall the words 
the teacher wants to hear, but without an 
idea in their dear little heads. 

Memory is not memorizing. It is some- 
thing very different. The two faculties are 
in fact scarcely related. 

Read the last paragraph to any teacher, 
college or primary, and I wager you will 
find it disputed instantly. Yet the under- 
standing of this statement would actually 
revolutionize the school system of America. 
You may cultivate a phenomenal capacity 
for memorizing and yet have little or no 
memory. Some of the greatest memorizers 
of the world have been subnormals. 

MEMORY is the very crown and seat of 
all the human faculties. Memory is under- 
standing. It is soul expansion, being. Mem- 
ory can be cultivated, too, but not by mem- 
orizing. No system of mnemonics is of any 
aid to memory. Indeed all such mechanical 
methods are open to the suspicion of being 
actually hurtful to mental growth. 

57 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

Who that ever heard the famous pianist 
Blind Tom attempt to repeat a difficult mu- 
sical composition from hearing it played 
once would envy the poor idiot his marvel- 
ous memory? 

Understanding does not depend upon 
memorizing. On the contrary, the effort to 
memorize defeats the understanding. Thus 
if we concentrate all our faculties we may 
actually assimilate a lecture so well, that 
while we may not be able to repeat a sin- 
gle word of it, yet it has all become incor- 
porated in us, a part of ourselves, as food 
that is perfectly digested passes directly 
into circulation, while incompatible foods 
will decompose and make their presence 
known by flatulence and regurgitation. To 
be able to repeat your words, your form 
of expression, is of no value to me, but to 
assimilate your thought perfectly and trans- 
mute it into my own language is under- 
standing. Most of the training in the pub- 
lic schools today is but intellectual regur- 
gitation. 
58 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

We remember too much now. What we 
need is a good system of forgettery in place 
of mnemonics. Give us less memorizing, 
more memory, more understanding, more 
light, is our prayer- 



59 



/^ 



Intuition and Its Place in the New 
Education. 

Chapter VI. 

MATERIALISTIC science in its investi- 
gations has always given too little 
credit to that higher faculty of the soul, 
Intuition. And yet, strangely, it is precisely 
to this sense that man owes his progress. 

Where physical science halts helpless 
against the dead wall of the impenetrable, 
Intuition steps in and beckons the searcher 
onward. Where logic could go no further, 
and reason could not see, Intuition has dim- 
ly perceived the truth there in that shadowy 
land of the unknown. 

When science retires baffled and beaten 
in its task, Intuition would carry the light 
still further if only men would trust her. 
This is proven over and over. 

The Intuition of both Darwin and Spen- 
cer was nearer the truth than their reason- 
ing, but, mighty intellects tho they were, 
they could not admit its findings into their 
philosophy. That they both caught the glint 

60 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

of deeper truths in this higher sphere, even 
against their wills, is almost certain. Had 
they but had the confidence to follow that 
light, who knows how much nearer the goal 
they might have carried the ark? But they 
could not do it. 

<4 f* <* 

And yet Intuition is but the instant focus- 
ing of all the faculties of the mind into a judg- 
ment, which reflects the highest thot force of 
the individual. It's simply a leaping over the 
intervening steps of testimony, argument 
and reasoning and arriving at the conclu- 
sion without conscious adjustments. It's a 
perfectly natural faculty and is neither to 
be feared nor mistrusted. It is the natural 
language of the soul. Why may we not 
trust our own souls, our own inner lights? 
Of course Intuition can rise no higher than 
the limitations of its instrument, the indi- 
vidual. But thru this sense man seems to 
come nearer to the heart of the Infinite than 
thru any other power of the mind. Its work- 
ing is beautifully exemplified in Walt Whit- 

61 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

man, who leaped at once all the barriers of 
class room science, seeing what Darwin and 
Spencer and Haeckel saw, and seeing still 
deeper into the Cosmic scheme where they 
faltered at the end of their scientific tether. 
<* <* t* 

Just now physical science seems again 
to have reached a dead wall. It has used 
all of its terms, reached the limit of its equa- 
tion, exhausted all of its paraphernalia, and 
must shift its ground, learn to think in dif- 
ferent terms before it can proceed much 
further. 

<• <4 <* 

We are still in the dark. The answer to 
the teasing riddle of existence is not yet. 
That ages-old question, * ' What is Truth, and 
where shall the place of Wisdom be found V 
still remains to vex the human heart. No 
system of philosophy, science or religion past 
or present offers a wholly satisfactory solu- 
tion to the problem of life. Amid all the find- 
ings of all the systems, life itself still re- 
mains unexplainable. 
62 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

Albeit the tendency of our times appears 
to be toward a broader view. Old landmarks 
are being swept away. Obstructions are 
breaking down. Physical science and its ma- 
terialism, voiced by the brilliant host of mod- 
ern giants, from Wallace to Haeckel and 
Miinsterberg is slowly yielding its defenses. 
Reluctantly giving way to the real^n*^*, 
that the true explanation of the Universe, 
with the origin and destiny of man, must be 
found partly or wholly in a realm quite out- 
side of the laboratory, in a field hitherto ig- 
nored by science. 

Some call this realm the spiritual world. 
Call it what we may, science now stands 
halting and confused, compelled to admit 
that no fact in nature can be explained or 
even understood by the light of physical 
laws and mechanical principles alone. 

What is man's place in nature? Which 
way will science turn? Is the curtain now 
about to be drawn aside? Is the answer to 
the riddle of the ages to come in these our 
times? We do not yet know. But it looks 
now as if we were coming into a higher and 

63 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

nobler consciousness of the meaning of life, 
approaching closer to an understanding of 
things than ever before in the history of 
man. Perhaps, indeed, the veil is about to 
be lifted. Perhaps we are in this day to 
see man come into his own. 

But a crisis is at hand. A new cycle has 
already begun. The future belongs to man, 
and the new science may well heed the call 
of Intuition as one of the keys to unlock the 
doors of that supra-physical world we are 
about to invade. 

* <* ti 

PLEASE do not get the idea that I am 
blaming the teachers for all the evils in 
our educational mill. I do not by any means 
hold them responsible. They are mostly but 
helpless puppets at the mercy of forces they 
do not suspect nor understand. I feel only 
sorrow and sympathy for them. 

In gloomy noisome school rooms I see the 
pale anaemic teachers, poisoned with their 
daily inhalations of bad air, most of them 
64 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

utterly fagged out, but doing the best they 
can in an artificial, lifeless system of teach- 
ing miscalled education. I see thp^ fr-vincf 
to mold the plastic soul stuff under their 
hands into the stereotyped nonentities after 
the patterns submitted by boards of educa- 
tion (Heaven forgive the irony). And my 
heart goes out to them. They too are help- 
less victims of the false and vicious social 
system we have allowed to encircle us. 

Teachers, of all people, ought to be filled 
with the divine fire of health, joy and crea- 
tivity, instead of the poor stupid automatons 
they are. No Rational School can ever be 
located in cities as now constructed. But if 
schools must be in cities, I know that if the 
teachers spent every other week in the coun- 
try amid the green fields, or could get cut 
with their classes and enjoy outdoor work a 
part of each da} 7 , they would remain young 
and be every day at their best. 

As it is the teachers lack any outside in- 
terest to keep the heart young. They lack 
even the elementary knowledge of the care 
of their own bodies. While the courses of 

65 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

study, programs and examinations imposed 
upon them by the directors take all spontan- 
eity out of teaching, kill all initiative, re- 
ducing their work to the most deadening of 
slavery. 

<g <* <* 

Teaching, which ought to be the most 
broadening profession among men, is really 
the most narrowing. The average teacher I 
meet is a mere husk with the life blood 
sucked out of her, like an old horse wearily 
plodding the treadmill of daily grind. 



There are a few teachers — how many I do 
not know — who are awakened to the great 
light now spreading over the world. They 

see the pathos and futility of the educational 
system and with their awakened conscious- 
ness they find their positions now almost un- 
endurable. I have received a great many 
letters like those I here present. I have 
not asked permission from any of the 
writers to print their letters so for pruden- 
tial reasons I omit names and addresses. 
66 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

From a Professor in a Technical College : 
"I am. with you in your crusade for Rational 

Education. I want to help when the Rational 

School is established." 

From a Teacher in the High Schools of 
Cleveland : 

"I would welcome the chance to join the 
Rational School as a release from the intolerable 
slavery of work in the public schools under the 
system. 

"But I must get out soon, or the last shred 
of initiative and spontaneity will be crushed out 
of me, Eighteen years in this grind! I have 
paid a terrible price for daring to think. The 
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is indeed bitter! 
I sometimes envy the poor creatures who do 
not think but simply obey orders and draw their 
salaries. They at least are spared the spectres 
that haunt me." 

From the Superintendent of Schools in 
a large Pennsylvania city; 20 years in the 
business. Cannot stand it any longer. 

"After having spent 20 years in high schools 
teaching or supervising, I am now about to leave 
the work. I have not been able to see how a 
man can do good and be a part of this system. 
It may be cowardly, but I cannot endure it 

67 



* ' 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

longer. I prefer now to let someone else take 
my work and continue the abominable business. 
I think you will be glad to know that you do 
not stand alone on the school question. All you 
say of the system is true, and it is even worse 
than you charge." 

Prom a well known teacher in Atlanta, 
Ga. 

"I spent the best years of my life in the school 
room. I tried to be the ideal teacher. But each 
year found the exactions of overseers more tyr- 
annical, the system more narrowing and soul- 
crushing. My heart bleeds for the little ones. 
But I had to get away from it or die." 

(0 <3 V 

Well, Comrades, do you suppose the dear 
somnolent stupid public will ever get its 
eyes open to the dangers that are poisoning 
life and its very fount — our honored and 
much loved educational system? 

It was in the hope of awakening some one 
that these papers have been written. Have I 
succeeded. Who can tell ? The future must 
bring the answer. But a day of reckoning 
must come. If not today — then tomorrow. 
68 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

Justice and reason are not mocked forever. 
The Rational School will yet be here to bless 
the world. I may see it and I may not. But 
I will at least have had something to do with 
casting the shadows that went before. 



69 



The Rational School and Society. 
Looking Forward. 

Chapter VII. 

THE Rational School must be the corner 
stone of the new free society. The prob- 
lems that beset human life, must be solved 
by men and women. In order to grapple 
intelligently and effectively with any ques- 
tion, we must face it with free, unbiased 
minds and without prejudice. 

That is where society fails today. We do 
not face life with free minds. Our educa- 
tional system sees to it, that the millions 
who pass thru its machinery come out with 
closed minds. It stultifies mental operations 
and almost totally inhibits intellectual 
growth by imposing upon the plastic mind 
of youth its preconceived programs and for- 
mulas; its cut and dried dogmas, supersti- 
tions and errors; its outgrown religions, 
philosophies and laws. 

That is why we move so slowly, painfully, 
tooertainly toward a saner life; toward 
70 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

a more human society. Against the solid 
mass of sodden, stupid, inert reactionary 
units turned loose upon the world by our 
schools and colleges, we have to oppose it 
only the few clean, brave, clear-seeing spir- 
its who have somehow — heaven only knows 
how — managed to evade the soul-killing 
clutches of the system. 

<* fit fit 

The function of the Rational School then 
is to contribute to society a new race of free, 
clear-thinking individuals — not shoe pegs — 
but live, (resilient men and women who can 
and will approach our social problems sane- 
ly, sweetly, bravely, without fear and with- 
out prejudice. In this way only can we ever 
reach a sane and just civilization. No en- 
slaved mind can ever bring the light of 
truth to bear upon any question. Because 
such a mind is closed against truth. Only 
free minds can hope to grasp great and noble 
truths. Only in freedom can man ever work 

out his salvation. 

71 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

I do not have to prove this. No body has 
ever denied it. Its truth is as patent as the 
force of gravitation. The world has always 
known it, but has never applied it. We 
are getting ready to do so now. And the 
first step as I now see it, is to inaugurate 
Rational Schools that will give us rational 
minds to deal with human problems ration- 
ally. 

Let friends of the new education rejoice 
over this fact ; — the Rational School will not 
have the slightest difficulty with the child. 
He takes as naturally to rational methods 
as a duck to the water. He is indeed our 
director and our teacher. You will get more 
of the true science of pedagogy by asso- 
ciating with and observing a child than 
you'll find in all text books on school psy- 
chology ever printed. 

The child himself tells us just what to do, 
as his needs demand it. 

<* <i * 

All our trouble will be with teachers 
72 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

and parents. We must, as I have said, evolve 
an entirely new type of teacher, and break 
down the stupid conservatism of parents. 
That's where the real difficulty will be met. 
Never with the child. He will respond to 
rational teaching as a flower responds to 
sunshine and the gentle dews of night. 

* <* <* 

If this were not true, I should indeed be 
doubtful of my own ground. But the child 
is a natural being. He proves the wisdom 
of our method by responding so beauti- 
fully. 

Look around you. See every school day, 
troops of children going with laggard, un- 
willing steps to their daily slave tasks in 
the school rooms of every city, town and 
village of America. See them in the school 
houses, with tired faces and lack-lustre 
eyes. 

Then see them released from captivity at 
4 o'clock, leaping and shouting with joy, on 
their homeward ways. Have we grown-ups 

73 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

no imagination? Are we so spiritually 
dense that we cannot see these things ? G-et 
the confidence of the next schoolboy you 
meet, get his honest opinion — not for pub- 
lication — of the school. It will be an eye- 
opener to you. 

Our whole attitude toward the child must 
dhange. The school of the future must be 
for the Child, and not for the teacher's 
comfort as at present. The science of ped- 
agogy as today practiced in the public 
schools is solely for the ease and conveni- 
ence of teachers. The child and his needs 
are not considered. Ideal teaching is a tre- 
mendous task, and a grave responsibility. 
What seems easiest and best to the teacher 
is nearly always the most difficult for tJhe 
child. 



Trust the child. He knows best what he 
needs. I'll back him against all the peda- 
gogical and theological bigwigs of the 
world. 
74 



THE RATIONAL SCHOOL CENTER. 

QN the 13th of October, 1911— Anniver- 
sary of the death of Francisco Ferrer, 
martyr to the cause of Rational education — 
the Rational School center was opened in 
Chicago at 3118 Lake Park Avenue. 

I propose to give there a series of lectures 
on Rational Education and other topics 
which seem to co-ordinate with a rational 
life. The proceeds to be used as a nucleus 
for the Rational School. 

The supreme question of the hour at this 
time is the Rational Education of Children. 
The child is the hope of the future. Society 
of tomorrow will be what the education of 
today makes it. 

Our educational machinery as now opera- 
ting in all schools and colleges thruout the 
world is breaking down at every point. It 
is out of touch with life. We now know 
that our vast pedagogical structure is based 
upon error. The system is fundamentally 
wrong and is a failure. 

Shall man himself or the System survive? 
Both cannot. One or the other must give 

75 



RATIONAL EDUCATION. 

way. The issue is momentous. The best 
miinds of all countries are earnestly grap- 
pling with the problem. 

The Eational School Center is organized 
to develop and if possible crystallize a sen- 
timent looking toward definite action in the 
establishing of the rational school. The time 
is now ripe for the experiment. If the plan 
which is to be outlined in these meetings re- 
ceives sufficient encouragement and support 
I hope to be able to start a branch of the 
Rational School in or near Chicago. 

Friends of Education who wish to aid in 
this greatest movement of modern times, are 
invited to confer with us as to our plans 
and needs. 

BRUCE CALVERT, 

Director. 



76 



SHORTER COUR SE 

THE HARMONIC SCHOOL 
OF RATIONAL EDUCATION 

I have been asked to condense the Eighteen Lesson 
course on Right Living into six lectures which can be 
given in one week. I accordingly offer this new program : 

1. Rational Education. 

2. Right Living-The New Gospel of Health. 

3. Breathing. The Science, Philosophy and 

Practice. 

4. Food Selection, Rational Dietary. 

5. Sex Ethics. Eugenics. 

6. Harmonics of Nature. 

Part or all of this series will be given anywhere on mo«t 
reasonable terms. Dates now being made for the coming 

season. BRUCE CALVERT, Inslrudtor. 

Address — Lecture Bureau. 

THE OPEN ROAD 

GRIFFITH (Lake County) INDIANA 

R. F. D. No. 1 Pigeon-Roost-in-the-Woods 



Take a 12 Months' Tramp Along 

The Open Road 

A Sane Sweet Toned Magazinelet of Faith 

(Not Everybody's Magazine) 

Devoted to 
The Philosophy of Joy 

and 

The Religion of Right Living 
Journal of the Universal Brotherhood of Man 

Published at 

Pigeon-Roost-in-the- Woods 

INDIANA 

A red hot little monthly regular for Mental 
Dyspepsia and Brain Fag. Recommended by Regular 
and Irregular Physicians, Christian Psychologists and 
the Pulpit Pounders Union. One Dose every Thirty 
Days for Twelve Months, $1.00 

Painless Cure Guaranteed or Money Refunded 
"We have no cemetery, not even a graveyard at Pigeon- 
Roost. No Preacher (except myself), no lawyer and the 
nearest doctor, thank God, is seven miles away. Why 
shouldn't we be happy?" 

Close to the Soil. The Songs of Happy Birds 
and the Scent of the Wild Roses in its Pages. 

$1.00 a Year. Trial Trip, Three Months, 25 Cents, with 

Bruce Calvert's new book, "Science and Health", FREE. 

Stamps or Coin, our risk. 

BRUCE CALVERT, Editor and Publisher 
Post Office Address: 

GRIFFITH, (Lake Co.) INDIANA 

R. F. D. No. 1. 

Pigeon-Roost-in-the- Woods 



JOIN THE SOCIETY OF 

OPEN ROADERS 

(The Universal Brotherhood of Man) 

An Organization without Organizers. A Society without Props 

and Stays. An Institution Founded on and Perpetuated 

by the Dear Love of Man for his Comrade. 

Abridged Extract from the Constitution and By-Laws. — Exoteric. 
Membership fee $1.00 a year: less than two cents a week, 
including subscription to the OPEN ROAD, the official organ 
of the Society. Life membership, with paid-up subscription to 
the OPEN ROAD for ninety-nine years, $10.00. No other dues 
or assessments, forever. 

(Note. — You don't have to subscribe to the maga- 
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better if you do, and so will the editor.) 
Eligibility — All men and all women who feel their kinship to 
the race are invited. 

Initiation — Greet the next traveler you meet on the Open 
Road with a smile and a hearty handshake, and send fifty cents 
to the Shrine of the Society for a year's subscription to the 
official Journal. 

Grip— The warm, healthy grasp of true friendship. 
Password and Countersign — "Howd'y, Comrade," and a 
sweet smile of kindly, human interest. 

Creed— Kind Thought, Kind Word, Kind Deed. 

Ritual — Doing our daily work the best we can, and doing 
it cheerfully, kindly. Living our lives sanely and sweetly. 

Litany — The voice of the wind whispering through the tree 
tops. 

Duties of Members — Live up to your highest and best every 
day. Learn to stand alone (as far as possible), and mind your 
own business (most of the time). Recognize the Divine in 
every man and woman you meet. Smile and be kind. 

Punishments and Penalties — We punish ourselves only. If 
you feel that you have conducted yourself as unbecoming a 



'/> 



member of the noble Brotherhood; if you have failed to look 
for the best in your neighbor, or if in a moment of weakness 
you have let loose a barbed arrow of pain to wound a brother 
or a sister, just send half a dollar and the name of your victim 
for a year's subscription to the OPEN ROAD, receive absolu- 
tion from the Shrine, take a new grip on yourself, resolve not 
to do so again, and forget it. 

Purpose — To encourage the sentiment for right living, and 
to express in our lives that beautiful spirit of Brotherhood and 
love for one another, which is to solve all human problems 
bringing about peace on earth and good will to all men. 

How to Become Member — Smile, and send half a dollar 
with your name and address for membership card and subscrip- 
tion to the OPEN ROAD for one year. - 

I have spoken. 

Done at Pigeon-Roost-in-the-Woods, Indiana. 

Headquarters and Shrine of the Universal Brotherhood of 
Man, in the Northwest Quarter of Section 32, Township 36, 
Range 8 West of the Principal Meridian. 

By BRUCE CALVERT, Keeper of the Shrine. 

Attest: ANANIAS. 

E NEED YOU. Come with us in our tramp along 
THE OPEN ROAD. Subscription and member- 
ship in the Brotherhood one dollar a year. Life 
membership and subscription, $10.00. 



BOUND VOLUMES. 

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for sale. Vol. II and Vol. Ill are also getting scarce.) 

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